You can't just say you love Microsoft, except for this part though. Putting malware and spyware into their paid products after the fact is part of the cash machine that keeps the more attractive products afloat.
Shifting the blame to the customers is pointless here. Most of them can't do anything about it. They are either incapable or just not interested after the system came with the PC.
What would be the point for those people to change to Linux if they can't do there what they've bought the product for?
It is working. I sure didn't expect platform parity when they announced it, and yet, I don't feel like a 2nd class citizen anymore. Linux games are now cross platform, not terrible ports. And the 3 largest game engines now compile to linux out of the box (more or less). The support burden has lessened as well. It is great all around.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that it didn't work, or there were shortcomings in the platform... only that sales haven't been great (think Steambox, etc).
I agree we can build plumbing complex enough that it can convince anyone, including itself, that it is self-aware.
We can philosophise about whether that's true consciousness. But that's the same directionless thought experiment as questioning whether anyone besides yourself truly exists.
I've actually thought a lot about exactly that: how can I be certain that anyone else actually exists? They could all, you could all, be NPCs populating my universe of one. The argument for this is that it takes far less computational power to render such an experience than it does to render that same experience for billions of people and all their complex interactions. But if it's one person than you simply render what they are currently experiencing. You don't render far off places, economies, environments, etc. Just focus on the individual.
And perhaps it's no simulation at all, but some super realistic form of VR (via brain implant?). Perhaps if the future world is a wasteland than this may be a way for future people to experience the "good old days." Or perhaps this is how education is conducted in the future: we live some number of virtual lives before getting a crack at a real one.
You're certainly begging the question by describing the plumbing as a perceiving subject: it can convince itself, as in, it is a subject of its own experience. This isn't some directionless thought experiment; it matters a great deal exactly what digital computers are.
